SOURCE: Hillenaar, Henk. “A Psychoanalytical Approach to Beckett's ‘First Love’.” Samuel Beckett Today 7 (1998): 419-37.

In the following essay, Hillenaar provides a psychoanalytical reading of “First Love.”

“First Love” is the first soliloquy that Beckett wrote, just after World War II. It has the characteristic features that we find in all his novels, plays or short stories. Especially striking is the combination of a strongly structured, and often comical language, which presents the thinking of a very “adult” person, on one side, with descriptions of very elementary sensations and feelings—those of an earlier life—supporting and feeding this adult thought on the other. In this story, a highly intelligent person is looking back to a highly regressive world, his own inner world, where he behaves again as a child, a baby, now and then even as a foetus.

Such behaviour reminds us very strongly of what happens in...